The Butterfly Smuggler
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Who is Ed Newcomer and what was his role in the Fish and Wildlife Service?
Ed Newcomer worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 20 years. He started as a special agent.
Who was Yoshi Kojima, the butterfly smuggler?
The very first case that was kind of given to me myself to run was Yoshi Kojima, who was what he called himself the world's most wanted butterfly smuggler. I mean, this guy, he knew fish and wildlife were after him, and he loved it.
Yoshi Kojima was so good at finding and capturing one specific butterfly in the Sierra Nevada mountains that people said no one else could even find any for two years. Ed Newcomer first heard about Yoshi Kojima in 2003. Someone had called in a tip.
We looked it up in our system and learned that he'd been under investigation for quite some time. In the 90s, Kojima was running around the western U.S. illegally collecting insects from national parks, including Death Valley and the Grand Canyon National Park. And Kojima, he's a Japanese citizen, but he maintained a house in Los Angeles. and a home in Kyoto, Japan. And what he would do is he would collect butterflies mostly, some insects or some beetles as well, but mostly butterflies from the US, take them back to Japan and sell them. And of course, by the time you're selling them, they're all dead and they're pinned like you might see in a museum. And some of these things, you know, depending on where you're selling them can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars a piece.
I didn't know that there is such a market for butterflies.
Phoebe, there is a market for everything in the wildlife world. You name it, somebody will buy it and be interested in it.
I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. So tell me a little bit more about how he would do it.
How did Yoshi Kojima manage to smuggle butterflies?
So he would change things up pretty regularly. So he was getting butterfly species from other parts of the world, including endangered butterflies, like highly endangered, that museums cannot even get for their scientific collections. And he would then sell those around the world using the Internet. He was an early adopter of eBay and different Internet sales sites, and he was making good money.
How would he smuggle the butterflies through customs?
I'm trying to think about this. I don't want to go into too much detail because I don't want to give a 101 lesson on smuggling for anybody who's thinking about smuggling butterflies. But basically what he would do is he'd hide them kind of in plain sight. When a butterfly is shipped between collectors or a buyer and a seller, its wings are not open. And there's a process that you can actually... you can moisten a butterfly a dry one that's pinned and then fold its wings up you know as if it's its wings are together and then you put it you dry it again and you put it in an envelope and ship it well when these butterflies have their wings in the up position a lot of the colors and patterns that help us identify butterflies are not visible in order to look at them you'd have to break the wing or re-moisten it and spread the wing out so
What he would do is he'd ship them with the wings up, he'd put them in a little triangular envelope, and then he would put them in with other butterflies or moths that are common, not illegal, would not set off any alarm bells with a customs officer or a fish and wildlife inspector. And he would ship them that way, basically rolling the dice that if somebody does even look at this shipment,
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Who is Ed Newcomer and what was his role in the Fish and Wildlife Service?
1:04–1:11
2
Who was Yoshi Kojima, the butterfly smuggler?
1:11–3:08
3
How did Yoshi Kojima manage to smuggle butterflies?
3:08–7:17
4
What was Ed Newcomer's strategy to catch Yoshi Kojima?
7:17–10:04
5
How did Ed Newcomer establish contact with Yoshi Kojima?
10:04–16:06
6
What challenges did Ed Newcomer face during the undercover operation?
16:06–33:59